Allwinner T-series processors such as Allwinner T2 are designed for the transportation / automotive market for products like smart rear-view mirrors, infotainment systems, and navigation systems.
While the company’s offered wide-temperature range support, AFAIK they did not have a part that had an actual automotive certification so far. This changes with their Allwinner T7 processor which is said to be the first Chinese processor achieving AEC-Q100 Grade 3 qualification.
AEC-Q100 is a “failure mechanism based stress test qualification for integrated circuits” brought out by the Automotive Electronics Council. The chip must pass various tests within their specified temperature range (grade):
- Grade 0: -40°C to +150°C ambient operating temperature range
- Grade 1: -40°C to +125°C ambient operating temperature range
- Grade 2: -40°C to +105°C ambient operating temperature range
- Grade 3: -40°C to +85°C ambient operating temperature range
- Grade 4: 0°C to +70°C ambient operating temperature range
Allwinner T7 comes with an hexa-core Arm Cortex A7 processor, a Mali-400 MP4 GPU, H.265 1080p60 decoder and encoder, support for microphone arrays, as well a MIPI, LVDS and RGB display interfaces for dual display setup useful for car dashboards. The processor also embeds an EVE (Embedded Vision Engine) for acceleration computer vision, object recognition. Overall, it looks very similar to Allwinner A60i / A60Pro specifications, so T7 is probably a renaming for Allwinner Business Unit 4 (BU4), which takes care of the transportation business.
The Android 7.1 and Linux SDK are now available, and QNX real-time operating system will be released by the end of August. The processor is ideal for smart dashboard, infotainment systems, digital instruments, 360° camera systems, ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems), DMS (Driver Monitoring Systems), and more.
The company introduced Allwinner T7 at CES Asia 2018, where they showcased prototypes with the processor including smart rear-view mirrors, dual display dashboard as pictured above, and 2-DIN infotainment systems. Notebook Italia is at the event, and they filmed a short video quickly showing some of the demos / products.
Allwinner T7 will at first be found in cars sold in mainland China, and for example Allwinner T3 was found in some Cadillac models. You’ll find more details in Chinese in Gasgoo.com article.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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One problem with allwinner is, it does not have a transparent pricing method compared to TI , NXP ,Renesas or cypress . If allwinner wants to compete on the embedded or Automotive market , the first thing it should do is make a transparent pricing.. so hope they work with major market players like digikey /mouser /element14 . All other kernel/stability issues are nothing , they are easily fixable. If somebody wants to choose allwinner over TI or NXP, they would seriously think that aspect .. hope some one would take that message to allwinner . See its lot cheaper thanNXP’s i.Mx series or TI’s AM33X series . .. its much better than Renesas CAR series … only thing required is transparent pricing & availability for at-least 10 years ..
why it’s always always very old technology … (Mali-400 , cortex A7) …
we use A53 now time to upgrade allwinner ….
Easier to get temp ranges, easier on licensing, etc. In this case, the 32-bit stuff seems to work out nicely enough (I’ve got one of the T5 based head units. If it wasn’t for some of the crap software from the root vendor in my Pumpkin unit, this thing would rock. As it stands, it’s rooted and some of the crap’s been removed and it still rocks.)
Be nice to have the newer parts, yes…but in the grand scheme of things, for a CAR (hint…) you don’t need this as much.